Rolling up over the hill on the way to work today, I found myself thinking about Rick Nielsen. This seemed initially to be an odd seque, even for me. But, I’ll tell ya how it went…

This morning on the RBW list,
Andrew S. posted a request for info and feedback about making a 650B
bike out of a Centurion (and, just to keep all the seque-balls in the
air, that is a phrase I cannot read without hearing Michael Palin
calling, “Cenchuwion! Cenchuwion!” in “Life of Brian”). About an
hour or so later, as I got ready to ride to work, riding the Zeus 650B
just seemed like the right thing to do - afterall, I had waxed
optimistically and enthusiastically about the tire size and the bicycle
in particular.

As I hit the incline to San Rafael, something deep in the mental
recesses coughed up an interview I’d read with a reasonably younger
Rick Nielsen. In it, he had nattered on about why he toured with so many guitars.
There was some odd quote about how he had to have all these different
guitars ready - so he could point to one and have it instantly
available. The statement was something along the lines of “…so if I
look out into the audience and see someone with a whammy bar nose, I
can get a guitar with a whammy bar…”

So, there I was gliding up the hill on a 650B bicycle, pretty much
because someone had started a mailing list conversation about 650B
bicycles. Could’ve just as easily been fixed gears, cyclocross bikes or
Quickbeams. Again, the frightening spectre of the bicycling
equivilent of the steam engine enthusiast in period correct coveralls
raises it’s ugly head…

I shook that off pretty quickly, but damn if I didn’t start mentally
replaying the lyrics of “Surrender” as the climbing rhythm steadied.
That song has some reasonably odd lyrics…

“Mother told me, yes, she told me I’d meet girls like you.

She also told me, ‘Stay away, you’ll never know what you’ll catch.’

Just the other day I heard a soldier’s falling off some Indonesian junk that’s going round.”

And just to continue the digression completely, I recalled that I actually saw Cheap Trick a couple times. The first was at - wait for it
- a Kiss concert, where they were the opening act. It was a trifle
surreal, perhaps enhanced by the, um, atmosphere at the Cow Palace.
But, there was this guy in a sweater, dressed up like someone from the
“Dead End Kids”, flipping something out of his thumb every time he
paused between power chords. The sound quality was 17 notches past
horrible, but it was visually arresting when Bun E. Carlos came out for
the encore with the big sticks…

Anyway, sorry if I got that song stuck in your head. But, it’s better
than getting the Robin Zander spoken intro from the song made famous on
the “Live at Budokan” album…